Artistic license

The 1959 sketch for a vacuum pump invented by Raymond G. Herb. Ion pumps like this were free of oil or moving parts, and led to research tools such as the scanning probe microscope.

If the highest function of art is to communicate ideas, then a recent and curious collection of technical drawings is very fine art, indeed. The inventive exhibit is about exactly that — inventions — historic inventions created at UW-Madison, and the patent illustrations that describe them.

“To me, each of them is worth more than a thousand words,” says Sally Younger, who helped curate the show.

“Many, if not most, patents have drawings associated with them,” she explains. “In addition to the words and the text and the abstracts that are in a patent, we also have these drawings, which help us illustrate parts or components, or illustrate how a technology may be novel and stand apart from the rest.”

WARF was created in 1925 to manage rights to the university’s creative property and to use proceeds to benefit research. The foundation was founded with its earliest patent, for fortifying food with vitamin D. In just the last year, WARF provided more than $100 million in support to the UW.

Assembling the exhibit wasn’t easy; WARF has more than 1,700 active patents. Why show them in the first place? “Art is a bold and unmediated opportunity to celebrate the thinkers on whose shoulders we stand,” says Younger, a WARF technical writer.

Staff voted for drawings that would most engage nonscientists. Viewed through an artist’s eye, techniques include expressionism and post-impressionism. How else, for example, to portray invisible genetic or electro-magnetic worlds?

“They are created to be understood,” Younger says of the illustrations. “Every point is deliberate. Every stroke is defined. And yet, at the same time, they can be deeply abstract, and there’s room for interpretation.”

What looks like a whimsical corset is indeed a support device, but for a superconducting magnet (patented 1976). A Braille watch (2013) may be viewed as a cubist’s cathedral. A solar cooking device (1957) stuns with minimalism, while all humanity is held within the humble shoelace-tying device (2010), for people with “birth defects, amputations, strokes and arthritis.”

A bland, circular map (2004) is deceptive in its simplicity: It’s the complete DNA sequence of bubonic plague, “the Black Death” that killed perhaps half of medieval Europe in four years.

And the ordinary art critic can but stand in awe at “Method for Ripening Cheese” (with ultrasound, 1959).

“Sometimes when I was researching them, I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole,” says Younger. “A single drawing opens up an entire story.”

A few other patent-related artifacts are included in the exhibit. As for the drawings, “There’s no glitter. There’s no color,” she says. “They are raw-boned and sincere, and their authority is precisely what is cool, in my opinion.”

In most cases, the artists’ identities are hidden, perhaps forever.

“Sometimes the images are created by an inventor, but usually by someone in his or her lab,” explains Younger. “Some of the vintage patents in the show are highly stylized, crafted by very skilled draftsmen. Unfortunately, their names are not recorded on a patent, so they are lost to time.”

The exhibit opened Sept. 30. “It was a smash,” she says. “It was very rewarding to see the various demographics that came out: everyone from inventors to musicians to high school students.”

But is it art? That’s a question that Younger has heard many times.

“The conceptual leap was not that these drawings are beautiful, because they manifestly are,” she says. “And it’s not that they took great skill to produce, because they manifestly do. The leap is, will people who are not scientists appreciate what they’re looking at?

“I have one promise: You will see something you have never seen before.”